


That Is Not What I Meant At All

by stella_bella



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-15
Updated: 2014-01-17
Packaged: 2018-01-08 20:40:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1137150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stella_bella/pseuds/stella_bella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>War was easier than falling in love, or at least, easier than falling in love with Sherlock Holmes.</em>
</p><p>After the events of "The Empty Hearse", John reminisces on the Sherlock that he used to know, and tries to figure out where they go from here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot. I highly recommend you look it up or re-read it if you have a minute; the entire time I was watching "The Empty Hearse" I couldn't get it out of my head. 
> 
> Also, this was written without a beta or a Brit-pick, so please let me know if there are any errors.

_Now_

Is it the same now as it was before? No, no of course not. But then, it was never going to be like it was before, it was going to be so far removed that this is preferable, this is infinitely preferable no matter how much it actually isn’t.

This is what John tells himself. It’s fine, it’s all fine.

He wakes to a silent flat, grey skies sewn around the windows, pressing damply to the glass. He is stiff and unsteady, still in his clothes from yesterday. The room looks strange with all the edges of the furniture picked out preternaturally sharp in the half-light.

He sits on the edge of the bed and rubs his eyes blearily, blinking to clear them. There is no sound from downstairs.

He takes the steps carefully, superstitious even now, and puts the kettle on. Leaning on the counter, he stares unseeing into the living room and frowns. If Sherlock is here, he’s silent, which is so unusual as to never happen, which generally means Sherlock is fact, not here, although two years can change a person, change their looks and manner and memories, and John is suddenly not entirely sure who Sherlock is anymore. He doesn’t even know who he is.

The kettle boils for several minutes before he remembers it, steam beading on the range and darkening the cabinet edge.

His tea tastes stale; locked in a cupboard for that long, though, what wouldn’t?

\---

_Then_

There had been a case, with a knife and a stolen priceless manuscript, two bearded thugs taking orders from a withered professor whose palsied hands had been remarkably steady on the gun. They’d shared a cab afterwards, back to Baker Street at three in the morning, leaving behind the flashing lights of the police cars and Lestrade’s resigned gratitude.

Sherlock fidgeted the whole way, now on his phone, now staring mesmerised out the window at the bright lights in the darkness of their city. John watched, cataloguing the signs of adrenaline high, the narrow hands that tapped and twitched, the mouth that worked unconsciously under incandescent eyes.

John was a moth, however stupid and clichéd that was, and Sherlock was, well, he wasn’t really so much a flame as an imminent nuclear meltdown in Technicolor, and John was trapped now, for good and proper, paying the cabbie without really looking at the bills in his hand, following across the sidewalk and up the stairs, the humming in his veins drowning out the warning bells in his head.

Maybe if he had been more than two steps behind on their way up the stairs, maybe if he hadn’t been fighting the same inner battle as a thousand times before, a hundred cases before, maybe he would have passed by, brushed his sleeve on the corner of Sherlock’s coat as it was settled onto the peg, rummaged for the tea and the cups, finding them in an entirely different place than yesterday, and made himself something warm to keep his hands busy as Sherlock roamed all over the flat, hair mussed and vibrating out of his skin. Maybe it would have been the same as it had a hundred times before.

But it wasn’t. It was John, closing the door and turning round, two inches from Sherlock and caught under his gaze. It was three seconds of stillness and held breath, a pulse rate that took off nearly vertical, and then Sherlock’s mouth on his.

\---

_Now_

John leaves the flat, door slamming behind him. He doesn’t even say goodbye to Mrs. Hudson.

Outside, the damp air hits like a slap, and he turns up his coat collar and strides away. He’s got twenty minutes to get across town and into the surgery, to get his head out of the lowering clouds and into charts and medicine and an eight-hour shift.

He catches a taxi on the main road and absentmindedly rubs his lip all the way through three traffic lights and a near gridlock. Mary will be wondering why he hasn’t phoned, and he really should send her a text at least to let her know he might be late, to tell her he’s even coming in at all, but somehow his mobile stays in his pocket and he’s suddenly at work, staring at the door handle of the car and trying to remember how it works.

Back in Baker Street, a striped mug of stale tea goes cold on a scuffed table.

\---

_Then_

No one moved for a second, just a second, but it was the longest second John had ever experienced, and he’d sat next to Harry that time in hospital after the binge drinking had nearly exploded her liver, and the doctors weren’t sure if she’d wake up, if she’d regain brain function, if she’d ever leave the room.

It was an odd thought, but considering how John’s heart had also just exploded, it wasn’t an unreasonable one. He wasn’t breathing, either, and Sherlock noticed. Of course he noticed, it’s what he did, what he does, and he quickly deduced a John shocked stiff, hand still curled over the doorknob and eyes frozen open, heartbeat too rapid for safety and no respiration, no movement, no response.

Sherlock put a hand on the door frame, preliminary to pulling back, and it was the sensation of his mouth leaving John’s, that little sticky-tug of skin on skin as their lips separated that did it. John snatched his hand off the doorknob and blindly wrapped it around the lapel of Sherlock’s coat. He closed his eyes, dragged a desperate breath through his nose, and kissed back like he’d always done this, or at least, always imagined doing it.

Sherlock tried once more, half-heartedly and obviously so, but John had been watching him get the last word and the dramatic exit for a long time now and damned if he’d let him walk away from this.

It was warm in the flat, overwarm actually, which was unusual because those damned floor-to-ceiling windows and the eighteenth-century construction usually conspired to keep the place comfortably north of arctic all the while charging central London prices for rent.

But right then it was warm, and John wanted nothing more than to strip off his coat and his jumper, peel the shirt Sherlock was wearing right off his fucking porcelain skin and shred it with his bare hands, bury himself in Sherlock and not surface for a good long while.

There wasn’t time, though, because Sherlock was making these lovely sorts of moans that John was fairly sure weren’t intentional, and if he pulled his mouth away so he could see what he was doing Sherlock might stop, so instead he settled for blindly scrabbling at Sherlock’s front, pushing his coat aside and yanking his shirt out of his trousers. He pressed his palms against Sherlock’s chest, felt the shiver, the goose pimples, the surprising sharpness of bone so close to the surface.

John’s own trousers were uncomfortably tight, and he fumbled a bit, tried to get his fly undone without taking his hands off of Sherlock’s skin, an unfortunately impossible feat, and so Sherlock huffed in frustration and pulled away, undid both their trousers himself and then surged forward, rattling John’s head against the door as he yanked their hips together.

The angle was awkward and the height difference challenging, but all John cared for was the long, dexterous fingers cupping his jaw, sliding over his throat, cataloguing every inch of his heaving chest and then grasping his hips and coaxing them into a rhythm.

He wound his own fingers in Sherlock’s hair, twisted the curls tight, catching them on the nearly-faded callus of his trigger finger.

Sherlock kissed fiercely, as if John might slip away at any moment and he had to keep him there, keep him pinned and deprived of oxygen and space, fill his nostrils up with the scent of triple-milled soap and expensive fabric, the brilliant burn of too much friction.

John didn’t care.

\---

_Now_

Mary greets him with a smile at the door, but John can see the worry underneath, bagging out the skin beneath her eyes.

She kisses him, and he pulls away a little too quickly. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“There you are; I figured you just got talking and stayed over. It would have been nice of you to phone, though. Or text. I was worried you weren’t coming in today.”

John clears his throat, offers, “Yeah, sorry. I meant to, but then it was so late and I didn’t want to wake you, so, yeah. I’m sorry.”

She smiles, and it reaches her eyes this time. “Don’t be silly, no need to apologise. Your best friend comes back from the dead, you nearly get burnt in a bonfire and then blown up on the tube? Of course you’re going to need some time.”

He has to look away, down at the carpeting, anywhere.

“Yeah.” It’s grey, with irregular flecks of something darker; maybe blue. "Thanks." Definitely blue.

She walks off to get his first chart of the day, humming something he can’t quite make out, and he watches her go, the sway of her hips and her neat blonde hair. He’s lucky, really lucky. Of course he is. And nothing happened last night, why would it? He went back to Baker Street, had a chat, fell asleep around two o’clock in the morning to the sounds of Sherlock experimenting on something awful in the kitchen, and woke up in his old bed. Sherlock wasn’t even there, for Christ’s sake. He’s feeling guilty for no reason, none at all, this is ridiculous.

He clears his throat again, follows.

\---

_Then_

At some point the kiss had devolved into a desperate sort of gasping into each other’s mouths, motor control rapidly eroding as their rhythm turned hard and frantic. John bit his own lip at the finish, head pushed flat against the door, and Sherlock shuddered open-mouthed into his neck, murmuring things that could possibly have been English but were more likely Serbian or Russian, and there went another thing John had not known.

Sherlock was boneless against him, heavier than he looked, the wanker, and John’s drifting post-orgasmic bliss was suffering under the weight. He shoved ineffectually at Sherlock’s shoulder, and when Sherlock finally did move, John missed the way they’d been holding each other up and nearly ended up on his arse on the floor.

There was a moment where he did not know where to look or what to say. They hadn’t even managed to get their clothes properly off, two grown adults with their lives supposedly under control and he wasn’t even gay to begin with.

Sherlock ran his hands through his hair and collapsed onto the sofa, chest still heaving and shirt untucked. His eyes were closed, colour still high in those pale cheeks, and John guessed maybe he was a little gay.

He pushed himself away from the door when he was certain his legs would hold, and started three different sentences before giving up and shaking his head and going to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

“Tea?” His heart was still pounding, but his voice didn’t waver.

Sherlock answered, “Yes, please,” slightly higher than normal, and John smiled to himself, that maybe this was okay, maybe this was fine, and then he happened to glance inside one of the mugs he’d found and nearly dropped it.

He stuck his head around the door, holding out the mug accusingly. “Really, Sherlock? Fingernails?”

“Well, where else was I supposed to keep them?” He sounded like a petulant child, but there was a softness to his eyes, a half-smile on his swollen lips and John shook his head, tried and failed to hide his own grin.

“Fine. This can be your cup, then.” And he marched back to the stove, grinning like an idiot. They were fine, it was all fine.


	2. Chapter 2

_Now_

Mrs. Pavel has been speaking for some time, quite a long time actually, about something to do with the condition of her bowels in the early morning, and despite regularly waking up wrapped in clinging nightmares filled with sand and blood, despite the ache in his shoulder before it rains, John finds himself wishing with all his might for the violent simplicity of a bullet wound.

He tries to focus on her words, but her hands are long and narrow, articulate, free from polish or jewelry, and he watches them instead.

Mr. O’Halloran has brought his youngest son, a toddler with wide blue eyes and thick black curls. John offers a reiteration of his previous diagnoses of sleep apnea and too many pints of a Friday evening to the tangled locks, encourages them to cut back on the drinking and sleep on more than one pillow. He asks the hair to come back in a month.

Mr. O’Halloran doesn’t notice, and neither does his son. John figures that’s about right.

Mary comes in at the end of the day, lipstick mostly worn off, but otherwise whole and unruffled; John sits in his chair and frowns at the stack of charts in front of him, at the work that must be done but will be a long time in the doing, and right now he is so tired, so very tired.

He stands, interrupting her reminders about the dinner this Friday with their friends Julie and Chris, and tells her he’s going home.

Mary grasps his shoulder, turns him around softly. Her eyes are kind.

“John, are you all right? You’ve been in a fog all day.”

He sniffs, works his mouth around words that don’t quite make it out, and nods. “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. Just-- Well.” He clears his throat and smiles at her reassuringly.

“I just need some time, I think. Some time to, you know, wrap my head around this.”

Mary squeezes his shoulder and kisses him, first on the cheek and then the lips. She really is kind, and perceptive, and smart and loving and all these other things, these other wonderful things that he should appreciate more, and he tries, he does try, but sometimes it’s so hard to be appreciative, to live your life constantly reminding yourself to be grateful, when all you want to is one single moment of glorious selfishness.

She gives him a little shake and a smiling sigh, kisses him again, lingers. On the way out the door, she reminds him she’s got book discussion and won’t be back for supper, so if he remembers to please stop at Tesco and pick up something to put in his stomach.

John sits for a few moments longer, the silence around him thickening in the aftermath of the outside door closing.

\---

_Then_

John was never sure of where he stood with Sherlock after that night, and maybe that’s what finished it, in the end.

Sherlock could go for days without sleep, or food, or John, could exist solely in the hallways of his mind, his body stretched long on the sofa and hands under his chin; going for days without touch, without seeing John, really seeing him, and since all John could see or think was Sherlock, this became a problem.

On a case, John was John, a colleague or a friend or a doctor or just a bloody wall to bounce ideas off of, and the Consulting Detective pushed front and centre in a swirl of coat and a cold smirk, and it was only after a case, the adrenaline tapering off in irregular bursts, that Sherlock would surface, his Sherlock, clear-eyed and melancholy.

John would live for a week on a single brush of Sherlock’s fingers, accidental as he handed over a mug of tea in the morning; on an incidental hand on his shoulder as Sherlock leaned impatiently, into his space over the corpse of another victim.

And then as the haze of the case lifted, as Sherlock came down from his ecstatic high, the manic glow behind his eyes would fade, and he could see, could see John again, and then John would look up and some things would get said or somehow telepathically communicated, and they’d most likely end up in a bed or on the sofa, or once, memorably, on the kitchen table suddenly and violently cleared of crockery and various experiments.

John would try to cram it all in then, the feel of Sherlock’s skin, the way his body was both strong and fragile under John’s hands, the sounds he made and the way his hair looked, wild and mussed and damp with sweat, falling over his flushed face.

John would want to stay, to come down slowly, ease into sleep and wake up still touching, hand to heart or chest to back, but Sherlock would be up before he even had the breath to speak, trousers hanging undone from his narrow hips, fingers flying over the keys of his mobile or running agitatedly through his hair as he muttered equations like epiphanies, and John wasn’t one of them.

So he would gather himself, his scattered clothing, and close himself in the shower, rinsing away his sweat and Sherlock’s scent. He’d lean against the wall, hands running over the twin bruises on his hips or the swollen bite marks on his neck, trying to remember at the same time that he wished he could forget.

He had a lot of sleepless nights; more so than when artillery fire jerked him awake, desert sand crusted in his eyes and a mouth tasting of metal. War was easier than falling in love, or at least, easier than falling in love with Sherlock Holmes.

\---

_Now_

John promises himself that he’ll finish the charts tomorrow, and heads out into the evening.

And somehow, for all his good intentions having to do with beans on toast and the unfinished book sitting on his nightstand in Mary’s flat, a quiet night in and a kiss when she comes in the door, he ends up on Baker Street, waffling outside the door like a bashful client.

He doesn’t even know if Sherlock’s here, and a small part hopes he isn't.

He is.

John stands in the doorway, one hand fiddling at the hem of his coat. He clears his throat, but Sherlock doesn’t look round from where he’s standing in the kitchen, goggles on and a beaker of something putrid in one hand.

John nods to himself, “Right.”

He takes off his coat and sits in his chair, feeling as though there is a spotlight on it from somewhere.

“I’d ask for tea, but not while you’re apparently liquidating corpses - seriously, Sherlock, what are you doing?”

Sherlock answers in a distracted voice, beaker aloft as he pours something into it. “I am measuring the rate of decomposition in liquid using sheeps’ eyeballs.”

“Of course.” John picks up the discarded innards of the paper and leafs through it. It’s from three days ago. He sighs and tosses it away, rubbing his eyes. "Sherlock.”

“Sherlock.”

“Sherlock!”

He turns in his chair, exasperation in every muscle, and Sherlock is looking at him, goggles now unsafely perched on top of his head.

John gets up. “How… how can you do this? How can you act like nothing’s happened--”

Sherlock puts the flask down and strips off the goggles. “Nothing has happened; you’re not dead, as it turns out, neither am I, and we are here, in Baker Street, after solving a case--”

John holds up a hand, shakes his head a bit. “That’s not, that’s not what I meant and you know it. You were dead. No, you were, don’t look like that. You were dead and I thought you were dead, and now--”

Sherlock drops his chin, eyes focused on John. “Now you’re engaged, with a flat of your own and a new circle of friends, and you think we won’t be able to do this anymore.”

John shakes his head. “I don’t think, Sherlock. I know. It was one thing to be risking my life all the time when it was just me, but now I’ve got Mary. And after everything she did for me, the way she helped me, the way she is helping me, she deserves more than waiting up every night to see if I’m still alive.”

He’s shouting now, and doesn’t quite remember when that happened.

“I deserve more than that,” he continues, deliberately quieter. “I deserve to have a wife and a home and go to bed at a reasonable hour and not worry that today’s the day I’ll end up face to face with someone who’s a better shot than I am.”

Sherlock smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I wouldn’t waste my time on the last one. As for the rest of it,” he continues, walking closer, one hand bracing on the counter as he leans into John’s space. “You might think you deserve those things, but you really don’t. You know you don’t.”

John swallows and blinks, quickly, incredulously. “Are you saying I don’t deserve to be happy?”

Sherlock leans back, hands sliding into his trouser pockets.

“Those things won’t make you happy, John. I know it, you know it; it’s just a matter of time before Mary knows it, too.”

“Before Mary--? Sherlock, Mary loves me and I love her, and she does make me happy, she makes me very happy.”

Sherlock sighs, tilts his head down and looks at John as though he has never met him before.

“If she does, as you say, ‘make you very happy’, then why are you here? It’s Tuesday night, Mary’s at her little book club meeting, you’ve got piles of paperwork to catch up on at the surgery, and no food in your flat. There are plenty of things you could be doing, and plenty of those things will, in fact, directly contribute to her happiness, and yet you are here, with me, not doing any of them.”

John does not have an answer.

Sherlock walks past him, into the living room, to stand by the window. “Saying you deserve to be happy with your life as it stands is like saying a bird deserves to be happy in a cage.”

John swallows, hard.

“We had something, John. We had something, you and I, and it wasn’t normal or safe or domestic - it wasn’t any of those things you so apparently prize."

John steadies himself, chin up like a soldier, and standing at attention almost takes away the pain. “Well, we don’t have it anymore."

Sherlock says nothing, fingers still on the edges of the drapes.  John wants to cross the room and yank them away, smash his elbow through the window and grip Sherlock’s face in one hand, glass shards glittering on their clothes and the floor, narrow cuts opening themselves in the skin of Sherlock’s face. He wants to grab him, shake him, throw him out the window to die for real and then jump after, a blaze of glass and blood and desperation, because that is what it feels like, inside, next to his heart.

He doesn’t do any of that. Instead, he clears his throat, says, “Right. Yeah.” And heads for the door.

Sherlock is still motionless by the window, watching the street and not John, and wasn’t that always the case, that Sherlock saw everything so clearly and could read the slightest motivation in the smallest of details, and still he could not see John, could not or would not see what this was doing to him, what it is still doing to him, every damn day of his life.

He trudges down the stairs, half hoping Sherlock will come after him, but of course he doesn’t. Mrs. Hudson’s door is closed and dark; she’s probably not even home, and so John steps out onto the street with no further excuses not to.

The walk home is very long.

\---

_Then_

The night that John ended things, Sherlock took him to bed and loved him.

He pressed his lips to John’s lips, to his fingers and palms, the hollow of his throat and the rough edges of his scar. John closed his eyes, tried to close his heart, and then Sherlock murmured his name into the soft smooth skin of John’s belly, let his damp lips catch there.

Two hours ago, they’d chased a murderer down an alley, and his bullets had lodged in the wall next to John’s head. John was so alive, so swollen with adrenaline and electricity and reflected light that he’d laughed, shrugged off a shock blanket while calling the bloke a bloody awful shot, and walked away with a swagger, the red and blue police lights painting him in victory.

He curled his fingers in the headboard, felt the wood grain bite into his hands, as Sherlock slid up along his body, hands covering John’s own and gripping tight, tighter than was comfortable, and John let him, of course he let him, just like he let Sherlock wrap his narrow legs around John’s hips and move at a pace at once sensual and excruciatingly slow.

Sherlock rested their foreheads together, gasping into John’s mouth, and John wrenched his bloodless fingers free, clenched them painfully in Sherlock’s hair and flipped them, hard, pushed the pace faster, fierce and unforgiving, closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see Sherlock stretched out underneath him, hands on John’s hips and chest and thighs, eyes blown dark and wide, ruined and debauched. Sherlock always accused him of not observing, but in this he was wrong, because John did see, he did observe, he just didn’t want to. Didn’t want to remember what he couldn’t keep, didn’t want to see what he couldn’t have.

John came back to himself slowly, heartbeat still echoing in his ears. He reached a hand behind him, tentatively, and met only rumpled sheets, still warm. He closed his eyes and stayed that way all night, sleepless.

In the morning, he came down for breakfast, and Sherlock was on his laptop, newspapers scattered around, and John had to move a stack of them to get in the cupboard for the box of tea. He spoke to the stove, listening to the murmur of the heating water. Told Sherlock that this was it, that he couldn’t do this anymore.

Sherlock didn’t look up. “Do what, John?”

John didn’t turn around. “This. Whatever it is, this thing we have.” His hand shook, and he flexed it, gripped the edge of the battered counter.

Silence from behind him, and when John chanced a look round, Sherlock was staring at him, eyes unfathomable and pale in the grey morning light.

John took a breath, tried to explain, “It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, because I do, you obviously know I do-- anyway. It’s just, we want different things, different… ways of being, and I can’t be who you need me to be. What you need me to be.” He fell silent, uncomfortably aware of the silence and the words he’d just poured into it, awkward and over-loud, practical and so very final.

Sherlock didn’t seem to have moved, didn’t seem to have any response at all. John was possessed with the urge to hit him, hard.

“Are you moving out?” Sherlock’s voice was low, blending with the rumble of the boiling water.

“What? No, no of course not. Not unless you want me to; do you, Sherlock? Want me to move out?” John was terrified of the answer; hadn’t even considered this, and it filled his head with a ringing, tunneled his vision.

Sherlock shook his head, and John exhaled forcefully, dropped his head and rubbed at his eyes. He spoke to the floor, “I want to still help you solve cases, to still be your-- your friend, just without, you know, all the rest of it.”

When he looked up, Sherlock was absorbed in an article, eyes tracking down the page and a thinking frown marring the angles of his face. He responded, “The water’s nearly boiled away now, John, so if you were wanting a cup of tea you should pour it now.”

John jerked, surprised, and poured the tea, turned off the stove, and took his cup into the living room, where he drank it as Sherlock filled him in on this case, this new puzzle he’d found, and his eyes were glowing from within. John listened, and asked the right questions, or the wrong ones, as Sherlock would call them, and it was entirely normal and usual and he should not have been worried about how this was going to go over, it was fine, it was all fine, and there was never any bullet to dodge at all.

The next day, two children were kidnapped from a posh boarding school and Lestrade called in desperation. Three days after that, Sherlock died.

\---

_Now_

He gets home long after Mary, and she is still up, still dressed, a book open next to an empty wineglass. She looks at him, and doesn’t say a word, but she makes him dinner from the odds and ends in the pantry, kitchen light blinding as John sits at the table, trying to remember how to use a knife and fork, how to swallow.

She tells him about her book, about her friend Louann and her boyfriend, the one with the bloodhound who got into trouble at work for playing _World of Warcraft_ on company time, about the new noise her car has developed.

John pushes his plate away, half-eaten, and kisses her. She kisses him back, climbs into his lap, and her hips are soft under his hands, her hands gentle on his neck, and it is not enough, not nearly enough.

Mary is asleep when he leaves, three in the morning and he hasn’t slept a bit, he’s got a shift at the surgery tomorrow at half eight, this is stupid and senseless, but he gets up and dresses, leaves a note on the table, slips through the door like a ghost.

Sherlock is still awake, still thinking, but then he is never not thinking, and he doesn’t look the least bit surprised to see John, out of breath and uncertain in the doorway.

He says, “Ah, John, could you pass me--”, but doesn’t finish, as John strides across the room and sticks a finger in his face.

“No, you do not get to order me around; I just walked out on my sleeping fiancée, left her in the bed, our bed, to run across the city in the middle of the night and see the most aggravating, obnoxious dick I’ve ever met in my entire life, and I’m not even sure why I did it.”

Sherlock’s mouth curls up on one side, and John aches fiercely with how much he’s missed him.

“Well, it should be fairly obvious, even for your minimal powers of deduction, John. You did it because you miss this, you miss the danger and the thrill of the chase, and those are things that I provide in spades.”

John smiles too, gives up on trying to hold it in. “No, you great arrogant sot. I did it because I miss you. I miss… us. You know, you and me? Solving crimes together?”

Sherlock leans closer. “Is that all you miss?”

And John can’t lie, not to this man, who sees everything so clearly and is now looking only at John, as though he is the only thing that exists. So he doesn’t.

Sherlock nods, asks, “What about Mary?” And John gives a helpless shake of his head, because he doesn’t know, he doesn’t have a clue how to proceed from here. He loves Mary, he loves her smile and her laugh, the way she cooks with her tongue between her teeth and how she does crosswords in ink; her hair and her kind gentle eyes and her way with stray cats and dogs and lost, broken people.

But he doesn’t love her the way he loves Sherlock, and knows he never will, he never will love anyone the way he does this man, with his hands and his eyes and his shrewd brilliant mind; the way he peels John’s skin right off his bones and is still entranced by what lies underneath.

So he blows out a sigh, and looks up and admits, “I don’t know.”

And Sherlock nods, and John shoves his hands into his coat pockets and wonders how on earth this is going to work; if this is any better than it was, because even if it was awful before, it’s worse now, but then Sherlock looks at him, eyes steady over the edge of his laptop, and no matter how bad it gets, this is still infinitely preferable to the alternative.

He sighs and shakes his head, and goes to put on the kettle.

**Author's Note:**

> Here is the quote I used for the title in context:
> 
> " And would it have been worth it, after all,  
> After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,  
> Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,  
> Would it have been worth while,  
> To have bitten off the manner with a smile,  
> To have squeezed the universe into a ball  
> To roll it toward some overwhelming question,  
> To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,  
> Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all' --  
> If one, settling a pillow by her head,  
> Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.  
> That is not it, at all.' "  
> T. S. Eliot, 1920


End file.
